The heroes of The Empty Chair inhabit a troubling, sometimes dark world. Michalis Makropoulos offers us glimpses of a sprawling metropolis seen through the eyes of solitary observers who keep moving on. Whether striving to overcome setbacks, gloomily watching children play in the street, gaining satisfaction from the oddest relationships or picking fights with their loved ones for trivial reasons, they roam the indoor and outdoor spaces of a vast city, seeking in vain to discover their identity. Diverging as they do slightly from the norm, the characters present a parallel, alternative version of reality. The action unfolds at a relaxed pace, foregrounding events that occur like a series of random snapshots. The landscape of these open-ended stories is Athens, which possesses both the local features that are peculiar to it and a universal aspect that tends to be identified with the unfamiliar, but also with hostility and danger.